Software development, agile methodologies and open source projects.

There's no doubt that having tests in a project allows you to find potential bugs earlier and more easily.

Lots of OSS projects require a minimum code coverage in order to accept new pull requests from contributors, and proprietary projects also tend to have some sort of continuous integration workflow which requires certain metrics to be fulfilled in order to get builds passing.

However, the code coverage can lead to a false sense of security, which makes you think that if certain class has a 100% code coverage, it is also 100% bug-free.

This is not always true, since you could be calling a method and yet not being properly testing its output or its real behavior. The code coverage will mark it as covered, but you might introduce a bug and still have a green test.

At some point, any enterprise project will probably need a message queue.

A message queue is used to publish information (usually known as messages) that a different "node" (usually known as worker) will consume in order to perform a specific action.

It is frequently used in web applications to pass information to background workers that consume the queue and perform long tasks, but it is also an important part when applying concepts like Event Sourcing to your architecture.

It is also really important when working with microservices, since it is a way to enable data exchange between each service.

Those topics cover a lot of advanced and complex practices, but today, I want to talk about a simpler subject. What is the best approach to pass data from outer layers of the application (actions, controllers, async jobs, CLI commands...) to services that are part of the use case layer, by taking advantage of some of the practices promoted by those subjects.

Earlier last week I found a github repository which collects different resources related with PhpStorm. Plugins, themes, utilities...

I found it very interesting, because I think PhpStorm is the best PHP IDE by far, and I've been using it on an almost daily basis for the last 4 years.

The thing is that finding that repository gave me the idea of writing a post explaining the list of third party plugins I use and why, in case somebody is starting to use the IDE and wants some ideas on where to start.

If you want to get any of them, just search for it inside PhpStorm. It's the easiest way to install them.